Most of Red America’s ‘blue dots’ can’t help Harris win. But this one might.

OMAHA — These days, the Tudor home of olson and Jason Brown looks like the headquarters of a wholesome, Seussian cult. One dot, two dot; blue dot, blue dot. There's a giant one nestled in the ivy on their chimney. Another stares out from a flag hanging on their oak tree. A trio of dots sits on their stoop — pumpkins, painted in shades of cerulean. Then there are their homemade yard signs: a single blue dot, about as wide as a basketball hoop, painted on a plain white background.

Like many Democrats in middle America, Ruth and Jason live in a city that is more liberal than the state where it's located. Unlike most of those red-state Democrats, though, their votes for president might actually make a difference in November.

The couple's sign-making operation began on a whim in August, fueled by spray paint and a sense of renewal after Joe Biden yielded the Democratic ticket to Kamala Harris. One sign began 10, 10 became 100, 100 became 1,000. On an afternoon in late September, the couple stood by their makeshift workshop in their driveway: rows of just-painted signs drying on a ladder, boxes of to-be-painted signs stacked in the garage. They were wearing matching blue dot T-shirts, with flecks of paint on their forearms and under their fingernails — dots begetting dots. "We're having a hard time getting it off of ourselves," Ruth says.

You might have heard of Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District. How it gets its own vote in the electoral college . How that vote used to go reliably red in presidential contests but has twice this century gone for the Democrat and looks like it may do so again this year. How, among the likely electoral college outcomes , there's a plausible scenario in which Harris wins the Rust Belt battlegrounds and Donald Trump wins the Sun Belt ones — in which case that single vote, from the residents of Omaha and its suburbs, would break a tie between the candidates and determine the future of America.

You may have also heard about how Trump and his allies tried to head off this scenario by asking local Republicans to legislate the district's electoral vote out of existence. They failed, just barely, but the episode underscores the paradox of this three-decade political science experiment: The more the dot matters, the more endangered it becomes.

For now, the blue dot is still here. And in Omaha, it's everywhere: The Browns have unleashed nearly 10,000 blue-dot signs upon the city, transforming its liberal neighborhoods into nightmare fuel for Republicans and trypophobes alike. There are blue dots on car bumpers, on mailboxes, on front doors where a wreath might otherwise hang.

You won't find many dots in downtown Omaha, a tidy grid of old brick warehouses and soaring modern skyscrapers tucked into the bend of the Missouri River. They're clustered along Omaha's flat, sprawling residential neighborhoods — alongside plenty of Trump signs, too. The district is, in fact, still a pretty purple place; registered Republican voters slightly outnumber Democrats, and nearly a third of voters are independents.

But what was once reliably red is now less so: It blinked blue in 2008, and then again in 2020, following the trend of highly educated voters across the country turning their backs on MAGA. A late September New York Times/Siena College poll found Harris leading Trump in the district by nine percentage points among likely voters, and a CNN poll conducted at roughly the same time found Harris with an 11 percentage point lead.

For the outnumbered Democrats of flyover country, the dot is not just a place, but a state of mind — a symbol of resistance, of relevance, of representation. The signs have turned up on the lawns of defiant liberals in Kansas, Missouri, Texas, even Alaska.

"I suppose you can read meaning into anything, but I think about the shape, you know?" Huebner-Brown says. "It's a circle, it's unity, it's easy. It's a happy little blue dot."

"That's what she calls them — the 'happy little blue dots,'" adds husband Jason Brown.

When it comes to the electoral college, the idea of unity — each state giving of its electoral votes to one presidential candidate — is not necessarily a happy one. Blue dots like Columbus, Ohio, and Austin get swamped by their surrounding red counties. Likewise, the red swaths of inland California and Upstate New York get nullified by their neighbors in more populous, more liberal metropolitan areas. In a world of winner-takes-all, everyone already knows who the winner will be long before a single vote is cast. So presidential hopefuls spend years and billions of dollars pandering to a fraction of the country while the overwhelming majority watches, unhappy and ignored, from the sidelines.

There are two exceptions: Maine, whose more-conservative northern district gets its own vote, and Nebraska, where the residents of greater Omaha have been blessed — now more than ever — with the anxiety of relevance.

"My Apple Watch alerted me, like, two weeks ago, that my heart rate was 10 beats per minute faster than the historical average," says Ryan Wilkins, a Democrat who lives with his wife and two daughters on the corner of a quiet street in Omaha's Westside neighborhood. He's one of the founders of the Facebook group "Blue Dot Energy (BDE)," a clearinghouse for liberal memes, volunteer opportunities, but most of all, building community with Omaha's fellow blue-dotters. Wilkins decided that the Facebook group would be a better use of his time than "researching Canadian citizenship requirements and New Zealand real estate, which I really did, really do."

"Nebraska sits at the crux of the Senate, the House and the presidential election, which is just ," says Grant Mussman, Wilkins's co-founder, emphasizing "fun" in a way that suggested it was not really fun at all.

Still, to be a Democrat in the blue dot is to experience a sense of control. "I'm very stressed out about the election, so I feel like I'm doing my part," says Sherrie Graeve, an Omaha resident who's been canvassing as often as she can in the campaign's final weeks. "I feel like I can make a difference in my community."

If you're searching for greater meaning of Nebraska's blue-dot district, it makes sense to start with what the dot means to people who live there. The more your vote means to the outcome of an election, the more it means to you, explains Richard Witmer, a professor of political science at Creighton University, in Omaha.

"It's good for democracy to have more representation," Whitmer says. "One of the things about this part of Nebraska is that people are more engaged in politics."

This has some desirable small-d democratic side effects, like higher voter turnout and more attention from the candidates.

To the district's Republican congressman, however, there's not much desirable about the current system at all.

"Why are we casting individual electoral votes when 48 other states don't do that?" says Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.). "It's sort of unfair."

Yes, the blue dot has a red congressman — for now. With Trump back on the ballot, Bacon is facing another tough reelection bid. On this particular Saturday in September, the congressman had packed the headquarters of Omaha's police union for a barbecue with his campaign volunteers, who picked at brisket and sipped lemonade in their "I like my freedom with a side of Bacon" T-shirts. "Don Bacon backs the blue!" declared a TV hanging on the wall. But a different kind of blue was on everyone's mind.

"We're a Republican state — how does the Republican state lose one vote?" says George Sefzik, a retired shop teacher from Omaha.

"It puts unfair pressure on the district," says Dean Mathisen, who worked in the district offices of both Bacon and his GOP predecessor. "Major DNC contributors donate here — whether it be to the Nebraska Democratic Party or to the candidate running against the congressman — to try to influence it instead of being more local."

Not that everyone there thought standing out was such a bad thing. "It makes our state a little more important," said Omaha resident Patrick Mahoney. "This would just be flyover country, otherwise."

Mahoney wore a camo Trump hat and was accompanied by his wife, Maureen, who said she prays every night for Trump's victory. If the current setup means Trump doesn't win his district, fine by Mahoney. "The more local control we have, the happier and more effective we'll be," he says. "I don't want someone mandating our vote from far away."

But to Theresa Thibodeau, a former GOP state senator, the appropriateness of a unified electoral vote is self-apparent. The Republican Party dominates Nebraska, from statewide offices to the Washington delegation. Even the mayor of Omaha is a Republican. Privileging the blue dot with its own electoral vote just doesn't make sense to her.

"We clearly are a Republican state," she says, "and I don't think one little area should dictate what the majority of the citizens of our state want to see."

So Thibodeau, who still lives in Omaha, commissioned her own yard signs through her Republican PAC: the state of Nebraska, printed red, on a white background.

Blue dot, meet red rectangle.

"We felt like our Republicans should be able to have their voices heard, as well," she says. "People should know that we're not entirely a blue district."

If you're keeping track, that's a cri de coeur from a red-dotter a blue dot a red state. Which raises a question: When it comes to the electoral college, what is a fair degree of representation?

Would our presidential politics be happier if more happy little blue dots had their own happy little electoral votes inside their big red rectangles? And vice versa, with red rural regions casting their own votes from inside "Blue America?"

To understand how things would shake out if every state followed Nebraska's lead, look to Congress. There are 435 congressional districts. In 2022, Republicans won 222 of them and Democrats won 213. Add in the two additional electoral votes every state would get for each senator and ... well, the setup would slightly favor Republicans, just as the electoral college does now.

"It doesn't change the outcome all that much," says Daron Shaw, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin.

As far as what the presidential race would look like: Instead of seven swing states, campaigns would likely target the 20-something competitive House districts. In other words, even if the candidates visited more places, they would still pander to a relatively small segment of the voting public. "The notion that is somehow a huge democratic innovation is nonsense," Shaw says.

The man who scuttled the pro-Trump push to iron out Nebraska's electoral wrinkle was a dot of another kind: a solitary state senator whose political coloration is neither generically red nor blue. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who became a Republican earlier this year because he opposes abortion, objected to changing the rules so late in the game. "It doesn't ring true, and that's not part of Nebraska," McDonnell told MSNBC late last month.

Besides, he explained, the existence of the dot "makes people work for our vote."

Maybe the battle in Nebraska is not about dots vs. rectangles, but about "unity" vs. independence. About working for votes, rather than claiming them.

"I don't think any state should be winner-take-all," says Dan Osborn. "That's stifling speech — that's taking rights away from people."

Osborn wears a Navy ball cap and work boots, the sleeves of his plaid shirt rolled up to reveal tattooed forearms. He is 49 years old, 20 of which spent as an industrial mechanic at the Kellogg's plant in Omaha. Now he's making a surprisingly competitive bid for Senate, as an independent, trying to unseat Republican incumbent Deb Fischer. His platform takes aim at corporate greed: Osborn calls Congress "a country club of millionaires working for billionaires" and often quotes the late comedian Robin Williams's quip that "politicians should wear sponsor jackets like NASCAR drivers, then we know who owns them."

He was recruited to run for U.S. Senate in an old-fashioned way: Rail unions in western Nebraska thought Fischer had been a poor ally on labor and rail safety issues. (Osborn became his local union's president and led a strike that shut down all four of Kellogg's North American plants, but defended workers' jobs and benefits.) The Democratic Party made overtures to see if Osborn would join their ticket, which he refused. "Jane Kleeb, the state party chair — I pissed her off something ," Osborn says. His campaign logo is red, but the heavy serif font is reminiscent of Nebraska's most nonpartisan unifying issue: Cornhusker football.

Osborn is hunting for votes in the red rectangle's reddest pockets, but he needs the bluest voters in the blue dot, too. To win, he'll have to find little dots everywhere and turn them into his own color. "Can you imagine the ramifications for American politics if Nebraska elects a mechanic?" he told an audience in Omaha on a late September Sunday. "People around the country would be like, 'Holy s-. Did you see what Nebraska did?'

If he pulls it off, Osborn would become a kind of neutral dot: a politician without a party in a U.S. Senate that will likely remain closely divided between Democrats and Republicans. It would be yet another Nebraska-born political science experiment.

As for the dot, its future seems as uncertain as ever. Republicans threatened to eliminate Omaha's electoral college vote after it went for the Democrats in '08 and '20, but this year was the closest they've come to actually following through. Its fate depends on state legislative elections, according to Witmer, the Creighton professor. If Republicans pick up more seats in the Nebraska Capitol, they would have the votes to reabsorb the dot.

Which they may be especially eager to do if the blue-dotters of Omaha end up putting Harris over the top.

"It feels like we're in a game of 'don't sink my battleship,' or whatever," says Jason Brown, the sign maker. That first dot he painted, in August, had come from a place of joy. The joy was still there, but the vibe had shifted.

"Now, it feels protective," he says. "Now, it feels personal."